Chapter 4 The Secret Society

POV: Dante

I stood by my car outside the university library, watching Annabelle from a distance as she held that photo in her hand, and while she probably thought I was just trying to control her, the truth was that her father saved my life four years ago when a hit went wrong, so I owed him a massive debt that I intended to pay by keeping his daughter alive. My own father also believed someone inside our family betrayed us to work with the people targeting Annabelle, so keeping her close was the only way I could uncover who the rat inside the Moretti organization was before they killed us both.

"Boss, she just got the note," my lieutenant Marco said, walking up beside me while looking at his tablet screen. "We intercepted a copy of the image sent to her phone, and I already ran the high-resolution scan on the glass panel like you asked."

"Show me the window reflection," I said, taking the tablet from him and zooming straight in on the bottom right corner where the killer's hand had been caught in the glass while holding the camera.

"Look at the ring on his index finger, Dante," Marco said, pointing at the small engraved symbol stamped into the band. "That isn't a family crest from any of our rivals."

"It's The Black Circle," I said, handing the tablet back to him while my chest tightened, because that society was made up of rich politicians' kids, corrupt businessmen, and future crime heirs who secretly ran half the illegal operations on this campus, and I had been hunting them for three full years without ever getting this close.

I walked over to Annabelle before she could panic, catching her by the elbow as she stepped away from her locker, and despite how much she wanted to push me off, she showed me the photo and admitted that she had found her father's name listed in an encrypted university database file that she managed to pull up on her phone.

"If his name is in the main system, then the core records are stored in the old administrative building near the quad," I told her, steering her away from the crowded library steps toward the back paths of the campus. "We need to check those files right now before whoever took this picture deletes them."

"Are you sure we can even get inside?" Annabelle asked, walking fast beside me while looking over her shoulder every few seconds. "That building has been shut down and locked up for months."

"The locks on that place aren't a problem for me, Annabelle," I said, leading her around to the side entrance, picking the door latch in less than ten seconds, and slipping inside the dark hallway with her right behind me.

We moved down the basement stairs into the main server room, where Annabelle sat down at the primary computer terminal, plugging in her flash drive and typing fast until the green file directories started popping up on the monitor.

"Look at this list, Dante," Annabelle said, pointing at the monitor as rows of names appeared on the screen. "These are all the students who vanished from campus over the last five years, and every single one of them had their files wiped from the registrar."

"Keep scrolling down to the bottom of that folder," I said, leaning over her chair to look at the screen as she moved the cursor down to the main administration access logs.

"Wait, my father's name is right here on the master sheet," she said, her voice dropping while her fingers froze over the keyboard. "Why is he on this list if he wasn't one of the students who went missing?"

I stared at the classification code printed right next to his name, reading the words out loud: "Project Architect."

"What does that mean?" Annabelle asked, turning her head to look up at me while her breath hitched. "My father was an honest man, so why would he be listed as the architect of whatever this group is doing to these kids?"

Before I could answer her, a loud metallic click rang through the hallway, and the heavy safety doors at both ends of the basement corridor slammed shut automatically, locking us inside the server room while the emergency lights turned red.

"Dante, the doors just locked!" Annabelle said, jumping up from her chair and running over to the handle, pulling on it as hard as she could, but the metal frame didn't budge at all.

A quiet hiss echoed from the ceiling vents above us, and thick gray smoke began pouring out into the room, quickly filling up the space and making it hard to see or breathe.

"Get behind me," I said, grabbing her waist and pulling her back against the wall while I used my coat to cover her nose and mouth to keep her from inhaling the gas.

"Are they trying to kill us with gas?" she choked out, holding onto my coat while looking around the room in a panic.

"They aren't trying to kill us, Annabelle," I whispered, keeping my body between her and the smoke while staring directly up at the hidden camera lens mounted in the top corner of the room, which had its small red power light blinking right at us.

"Then what are they trying to do?" she asked, her eyes wide as she looked up at me through the thick fog.

"They're trying to see what your father told you," I said, holding her tight against my chest as the gas grew thicker around us.